This film is a tricky
object: it slips between your eyes. It’s hard to know how to write about
it, what angle to take. One could say the same of certain films by Renoir
(The Woman on the Beach), Mizoguchi (The Empress Yang Kwei Fei)
or Preminger (Bonjour Tristesse). But with those films it’s a question
of an almost ascetic classicism, aiming to render the result as smooth
as possible, without any sign of effort – to the extent that some people
have taken these masterpieces as works of no interest, cold and academic.
Here, it’s the exact opposite: an uninterrupted succession of visionary
effects, including many that are bloody and shocking. But these asperities
are so numerous and so frequent that they end up creating a new formula,
a second-degree smooth surface, for which I can find virtually no equivalent
in cinema history. This impenetrable character is due, above all, to the
treatment of the story and, on another level, the nature of its
significations.

At the start, however,
the structure seems traditional and reassuring: straight away we see the
main character, who we will follow through to the final shot (apart from
some absences in its second part). This protagonist gives us in voice-off
his impressions and comments on the action. So the spectator has someone
to attach himself to, to identify with. We encounter here a principle
common in crime or fantasy film (and fiction): the recourse to a sole
protagonist, a promoted narrator, allowing the audience to introduce itself
more easily into a strange world. Any more direct contact with the unusual
universe of Ruiz would be completely disheartening.

Such identification,
however, is hardly exploited to the hilt. Quite simply because the actor,
Jean-François Lapalus, gives this protagonist a lifeless appearance
– a banal face, somewhat bloated, a little too much like the ‘average
young Frenchman’ – which is almost caricatural, forbidding identification,
just like his infantile reactions (he ceaselessly repeats, ‘I want to
return to Paris’) and his spinelessness (he lets himself be slapped in
the face and spat on without reacting). Above all, he is more than anything
a guiding thread: we follow him, but we resist being him. He’s
far too mediocre ... The conception of this figure recalls the narrator
in a film Ruiz made five years earlier, Three Crowns of the Sailor,
which itself makes direct reference to the sailor in The Lady from
Shanghai – minus Welles’ charm as an actor.

The narrator starts
out as a projectionist in an Arabic cinema in Paris (Belleville, where
Ruiz lives next to two former Arabic cinemas, the Berry and the Bellevue).
He finds himself confronted with unusual facts: for example, his fellow
projectionist Kassem, who permanently sports a balaclava with a hole in
it (so he can smoke), designed to hide the burn marks on his face. We
can’t see them but (as he informs us) they are worse than the wounds on
his hands – which, as one shot shows us, are rather nasty. The narrator
frequently watches the Oriental films which he projects, with their lascivious
dances and trashy exoticism. At the film’s twelve minute mark, our hero
tells us that he had an atrocious dream. In fact, this so-called dream
is no more oneiric than the images which precede it – like the unknown
young woman who pokes the torso of sleeping narrator with her fingers,
or the strips of flesh which fall from Kassem’s face.

All through the film,
there are three categories of images – reality, dream, and projected movie
– and Ruiz never stops looking for ways to confuse them. Moreover, the
dream is influenced by the movie screened. Both dream and movie are characterised
by their Oriental context, which is also not absent from reality (the
Arabic cinema and Kassem). It becomes increasingly useless and impossible
to tell them apart. During this incoherent, contradictory dream, a young
woman dies in the hero’s bedroom – an event for which he is not responsible.
However, as ‘she had only come to my place on the condition of not being
spotted by anyone’, our man places the corpse (which he has cut into pieces)
in a trunk, which he then carries on foot in the street, then in his car
towards a forest, where he hurls it in the river.

At the forty minute
mark, the hero, seen in bed, confirms in voice-off that he is feverish
and delirious. So it has clearly been a dream, although we might doubt
this for a moment because of the length of the episode (almost half an
hour), its traditional crime-story schema (the process of hiding a corpse),
and certain extremely prosaic, realistic lines (that famous ‘I want to
return to Paris’).

But we immediately
set off elsewhere. The sick hero makes clear: ‘Allah had taken pity on
me. There was a chance to start a new life.’ We then see a bearded youth,
thin and half naked, scarcely French at all in appearance, at the edge
of the water and in a forest, fully lit. Is this a reincarnation? One
can imagine so. Is it a dream? The facts shown are not especially oneiric.
In the playing out of this sequence, at the fifty minute mark, a dance
scene takes us – with the continuity created by a new common language,
old Spanish – into a sumptuous Grenada palace, populated by Arabs who
strongly resemble those we have seen in the projected movie. The actors
in the movie, the reincarnation, the dream and the reality are sometimes
the same. But without this being explained, as in the type of film which
switches between present and past (or dream, as is the case in Christian
Jacque’s François 1er, The Woman in the Window and
René Clair’s Les Belles de nuit). Just when we come to think
that we are either in reincarnation or dream mode, we realise that we
are inside the projected movie, since we suddenly see the lights of the
projector and our hero, who looks into the theatre from the booth (as
before), declares: ‘I didn’t need to watch the film anymore’ – although
it has marked him sufficiently to be the sole source for his dreams. This
part of the film is centred on the richness of exotic fantasy.

Certain significations
are expressed directly by the voice-off. The principle is defined in the
formula, ‘We lose our minds because all is two, except Allah who is one’
(the formula gets more complicated in the case of twins: ‘One becomes
two and two become one’). This principle covers everything that exists:
this explains the reincarnation of the hero as his contrary. Joined by
his uncle, who sticks with him for the greater part of the film, he suddenly
discovers that he himself is uncle to a nephew who emerges unexpectedly
and who, moreover, is hardly any younger. The eye of the dead oxen corresponds
to the eye of the woman. A brief shot of an immobile extra is followed
– same framing, some costume – by a shot of his skeleton, then a shot
of the narrator. As for the woman cut into pieces in the trunk, ‘each
of her members from now on inhabits the body of my uncle’. When he throws
the trunk in the water, nudging it away with an stick, it isn’t the woman’s
moan he hears, but a masculine voice that can be attributed to the uncle
– but also to himself, since the narrator was the first, in an earlier
scene, to offer this characteristic complaint: ‘In my chest, three hearts
beat.’ (This scene offers one of best sound inventions in a film that
is very rich on the sonic level.) This game is extended infinitely in
every scene of the film, reflecting the basic, theoretical hypothesis:
‘I walked all night, only to realise I had hardly moved.’

Such losses of identity
have all the more force given that the central character and the narration
of facts were so well defined at the film’s outset. The identity of a
thing plus its contrary: this systematic mix-up also affects time, as
the staggering final address testifies:

I understood that a
single day had unfolded, and in the space of this day I had aged forty
years. A day, or maybe a month and a day, it matters little – present,
future, day, month, childhood, youth, old age ... All these are merely
hollow words to me. My life, perhaps I should say our lives amount to
a single, uniform season perpetually re-begun. In a single day, a single
place, we can live all the days of our life – but we are condemned to
re-live them endlessly.

Certainly, one can
claim that this all amounts to a gratuitous aesthetic game. But this kind
of game is extremely rare in the artistic domain, and rarer still within
the context of cinematic expression. This exceptionality must be noted.
And above all, the principle is pushed to its peak, since each moment
of the film offers us a new, completely unexpected application – which
no one could mistake for mere repetition.

Better still, what
might appear a game is only a discreet, modest, polite way of clarifying
the relationship of man to the world. For it is hard not to have ever
felt this impression of identity-loss, of the vanity of definitions, during
one’s life. If we had to summarise contemporary art, we could suggest
that it offers man a way of seeing, and accepting, his own nothingness.
Here, such an acceptance is worked via a two-pronged process: a maximum
presentation of attractive, bizarre or shocking elements, as well as a
maximum refutation of the veracity and depth of these elements. The emotion
created by this refutation is even stronger than that created by the spectacle.
Ruiz’s reductive effort hits a level which is difficult to imagine: after
the making-marvellous that arises from the oriental fairy tale, valorised
a contrario by a slow leave-taking or abandoning of the naturalistic
and miserabilist elements, we are surprised by successive annulments,
which leave us, by the end, faced with nothing, a nothing increasingly
emphasised with each scene, a veritable mountain of Nothingness. I’ve
now seen The Blind Owl seven times, and I know a little less about
it with each viewing.

A madhouse, a joke,
a trompe l’œil ... of course, but to the nth degree. It’s a film
which doesn’t leave the spectator unscathed: it drives you crazy. Moreover,
it constitutes a special challenge to critics. It is rather symptomatic
that a work of this sort has no right to even a single mention in the
press. I would have to confess that it’s the film which has given me the
most difficulty in my entire time as a critic. This very text you are
reading strikes me as an impossibility par excellence – thus giving me
extra motivation to write it.

If I had to furnish
a comparison, it would be with Duras’ Destroy, She Said or, better
still, Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating – a film about theatre
as The Blind Owl is about cinema. The reference isn’t gratuitous,
since Rivette’s film was co-written by another Latin American, Eduardo
De Gregorio (Argentinean, not Chilean like Ruiz). The Blind Owl
can be understood more easily if one has read Borges, Cortázar,
Bioy Casares and a few others. The first person to have doubled a character
across two actors is, moreover, a filmmaker in the Mexican mode, Buñuel
in That Obscure Object of Desire – followed closely by Merry
Go Round, another Rivette-De Gregorio collaboration: the crucial renewal
of cinema in contemporary times has come from Latin America.

1. A
complete English translation (by Iraj Bashiri) of this novel can be found
here.
In this site devoted to "Persian Language and Literature", Sadegh
is rendered as Sadeq – Eds.

It may seem
surprising that I place these references above those furnished by the film’s
credits. The Blind Owl was originally a short novel written in 1936
by Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1950). (1) But, in truth, Ruiz draws relatively
little from this source: the uncle who rises suddenly from who-knows-where,
the permanent covering on the face, the skylight that is perceived, the
lines concerning corpses, the animal carcasses at the butcher’s, the eye
detached from a body; as well as the narrator’s sickness, the woman who
suddenly dies in the hero’s bedroom, and the long transference of the body,
the principle of struggle between the two rivals. Ruiz ignores the book’s
basic premise: the narrator’s difficult relationship with his wife, who
sleeps with everybody except him. And he adds everything concerning the
projected movie and the picture theatre, which is not to be found in Hedayat.

Certainly, there is
one external common point: the narrator’s vision, and the world he perceives,
harbour a strangeness common to both novel and film. But the difference
is major: Hedayat’s universe is marked by neurasthenia and, it would seem,
schizophrenia (the author killed himself). We are not too far from Kafka
or Tarkovsky – but at the other extreme from Celine and Julie.
With death, the narrator sees above all the hope of nothingness, but dreads
the chance ... of a second life. He dies, while Ruiz’s hero passes through
all these tests like a zombie, quite indifferent to reality’s lack of
meaning. Ruiz’s luxuriant aesthetic, and his comic touches, give the film
an exuberant character absent from Hedayat – a man of implacable moroseness.

Hedayat, like Ruiz,
situates himself in an Oriental context. But while the Iranian anchors
this context in a miserable daily reality, for the Chilean the Oriental
world is opposed to a daily French reality, and draws upon a traditional
kind of exoticism, facile but seductive. There are as many differences
here as between the Orients depicted by Naruse and Sternberg – whose taste
for placing vegetation in the foreground reappears in Ruiz.

The very title is never
justified in Ruiz’s film, except in its sheer formal beauty. In Hedayat,
it is just barely explained: the narrator compares himself to an owl,
and alludes to a hermetically blinded skylight. Ruiz seems above all to
have wished to profit from the cover provided by the fact of adaptation:
few people know of Hedayat, and it’s easy for them to automatically attribute
all the weirdness of the film to this apparent ‘cult novel’. Moreover,
the credits are ambiguous: shortly after the title comes this mention:
‘The Condemned, freely inspired by The Blind Owl, and by
Condemned Through Lack of Faith by Tirso de Molina.’ This is the
first time that credits have ever cited source material as far apart as
a 1936 Iranian novel and a 1625 Spanish play! A cosmic will accrued by
the recourse to five languages (French, Spanish, Arabic, German, Italian)
– and even more than five languages, once the film’s unusual subtitling
of unheard words begins. The whole thing, filmed by a Chilean, is a French
film, or rather a regional film, since it was shot in Le Havre
and produced by the local Maison de la culture – the kind of project that
usually concerns itself with regional problems and gripes ...

The borrowings from
Tirso are more punctual, and are situated in the film’s last third: they
concern a perfect Catholic who has followed dogma in the purest way, and
who is thus sure of going to heaven. However, this lack of humility means
he will be refused entry, while a sinner who committed evil his whole
life gains his ticket to Paradise because he repented at the last second
... What’s more interesting in Ruiz is not so much the representation
in dialogue of this seesawing game, but rather the insertion of a purely
Christian problematic into a specifically Arab and Muslim context – something
debated by seventeenth century theologians. Imagine the strangeness of
a Mauriac among the Ayatollahs ...

Once, I wanted to watch
The Blind Owl on a Secam player, but only had a Pal cassette. So,
no colour. A few seconds later, I realised that it was absolutely impossible
to keep watching. I couldn’t see or follow anything! Previously, I had
watched many colour films on my black and white set without too many problems.
But I realised that, of all the films I know, The Blind Owl is
truly the one for which colour reception is utterly indispensable.

I am certain that if
Ruiz only made one film every two years, like everybody else, The Blind
Owl would have been an event.

The Blind Owl
offers a series of very diverse formal elements, superimposed without
annulling each other – a true inverted pyramid – achieving an aesthetic
apotheosis: it is at once an enormous joke and a cosmic, existential work
on the human condition. We are not terribly far from Smiles of a Summer
Night. And rarely has a film’s ending provided such a succession or
simultaneity of contradictory elements – mixing the extremes of pessimism
and joy – or a summit quite so bewitching and extravagant. This finale
is part of what makes The Blind Owl French cinema’s most beautiful
jewel of the past decade.